Amazon working on flying drones to deliver packages to your doorstep

This sounds straight out of a science fiction movie, but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed to “60 Minutes” that his company plans to use flying drones to deliver packages to customer’s doorsteps within 30 minutes of their order.

Bezos surprised the crew from the CBS news magazine program by showing off one of the Seattle company’s R&D projects – a delivery service called Amazon Prime Air, which would use a fleet of flying drones called “octocopters.”

CBS aired its interview with Bezos Sunday night on “60 Minutes” and posted the extra behind-the-scenes video below (click HERE if you can’t see it).

In this transcript CBS provided to news outlets, the new owner of the Washington Post described the octocopters to “60 Minutes” interviewer Charlie Rose:

BEZOS: We can carry objects, we think, up to five pounds, which covers 86 percent of the items that we deliver … These generations of vehicles, it could be a ten-mile radius from a fulfillment center. So, in urban areas, you could actually cover very significant portions of the population. And so, it won’t work for everything; you know, we’re not gonna deliver kayaks or table saws this way. These are electric motors, so this is all electric; it’s very green, it’s better than driving trucks around. this is all an R&D project.

ROSE: What’s the hardest challenge in making this happen…

BEZOS: The hard part here is putting in all the redundancy, all the reliability, all the systems you need to say, ‘Look, this thing can’t land on somebody’s head while they’re walking around their neighborhood’…

ROSE: Yeah, that’s not good.

BEZOS: That’s not good.

Bezos went on to say Prime Air can’t take off before 2015 at the earliest because Amazon still needs to convince the FAA to change its rules to allow such a service.

What’s next, pizza? Well, maybe. Turns out Amazon isn’t the only company working on a drone delivery service.

Bloomberg News in October reported on Silicon Valley VC Tim Draper investing in a company called DroneDeploy.

Draper told Bloomberg News in a e-mail that “Drones hold the promise of companies anticipating our every need and delivering without human involvement. Everything from pizza delivery to personal shopping can be handled by drones.”

Then there were the four Atlanta-area men who were busted last week for using a remote-control helicopter drone to try to smuggle contraband tobacco into a Georgia prison.